Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Choruses

Choruses

Troupe, Quincy

Paperback

Black American StudiesGeneral PoetryJazz

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 156689090X
ISBN13: 9781566890908
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: Oct 1 1999
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.49
Height: 0.35 Width: 6.99 Depth: 9.89
Language: English
Virtuoso poems of African American life, laced with the seduction of jazz and the crackle of politics.

Quincy Troupe launches a pyrotechnic display of jazz rhythms, political commentary, sports tributes, travelogues, and architectural abstracts in his latest volume of poetry, Choruses. Merging traditional poetic form with contemporary content, Troupe fashions words & sounds that build bridges toward a new tongue as he writes in Song, an ars poetica. Only Troupe could write a sestina chronicling the mass suicide of Heavens Gate, or a villanelle for Michael Jordan: rising up in time, michael jordan hangs like an ikon, suspended in space / / his eyes two radar screens screwed like nails into the mask of his face. A masterful technician, Troupe experiments with free verse as well, repeating the same words in three different line-break configurations in Images: Three Variations of Shape & Form. From haiku to tanka, from Mark McGwire to Sammy Sosa, from bebop to hip hop, these choruses become sound tracks lifted off a poets tongue, / / syllables, within moments, are transformed into song.

With oracular power and the boldness of jazz improvisation, these poems by the acclaimed biographer of Miles Davis celebrate modern African American life without shying away from sharp critiques of social injustice. Where ahead-of-the curve ideas and canonical form intersect, there you will find our best modern-day troubadour, Quincy Troupe.

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